'Islamophobia' and the Latest New York Jihad Plot

As the mainstream media and Leftist activists continue their campaign to convince Americans that “Islamophobia” is a greater threat than jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, the jihad continues. Charles C. Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Education Project at the Newseum, did his bit to convince Americans that there is some massively funded, insidious anti-Muslim campaign going on when he wrote in the Washington Post last Tuesday that “groups involved in the ‘stop Islamization of America’ campaign have spent more than $40 million attempting to convince the public that American Muslims practice an inherently violent and oppressive faith that seeks to subvert the Constitution.”

Haynes was well over 99% off regarding the current operating budget of the American Freedom Defense Initiative’s Stop Islamization of America project, of which I am associate director. But even that howling inaccuracy and flagrant disregard for the facts was not the worst of the problems with Haynes’ article. Unfortunately for Haynes, the day after his article appeared, a young Muslim named Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis was arrested after trying to detonate what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb in front of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City – which he wanted to do, he said, “for the Muslims,” to “make us one step closer to run the whole world.”

Nafis’s action demonstrated vividly that no “Islamophobe” need spend a dime to convince Americans that “Muslims practice an inherently violent and oppressive faith that seeks to subvert the Constitution,” even if anyone actually wanted to do so. Plenty of Muslims are doing just fine convincing Americans of that, without any outside help at all.

For if many Muslims themselves didn’t think that Islam is an inherently violent and oppressive faith that seeks to subvert the Constitution, it is hard to imagine where Nafis could have gotten the idea that he needed to carry out a terror attack that would “shake the whole country” and constitute “one step ahead, for the Muslims … that will make us one step closer to run the whole world.” And it’s true: the subjugation of the world under the rule of Islamic law is indeed a traditional Islamic imperative, delineated in Islamic law.

Nor is Nafis alone in citing Islamic imperatives for his actions. Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square in 2010, said in a video at that time:

Jihad, holy fighting in Allah’s cause, with full force of numbers and weaponry, is given the utmost importance in Islam....By jihad, Islam is established....By abandoning jihad, may Allah protect us from that, Islam is destroyed, and Muslims go into inferior position, their honor is lost, their lands are stolen, their rule and authority vanish. Jihad is an obligation and duty in Islam on every Muslim….Islam will spread on the whole world. And the democracy will be defeated, and so was Communism defeated, and all the others isms and schisms will be defeated, and the word of Allah will be supreme, inshallah.

Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, who murdered Pvt. William Long outside a military recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas, in June 2009, explained:

I’ve loved jihad every [sic] since I became Muslim….Step by step I became a religiously devout Muslim, Mujahid -- meaning one who participates in jihad…What I had in mind didn’t go as planned but Allah willing He will reward me for my intentions.

Only gratification from Allah is what I want; therefore, it is what I seek….You who created mankind and who is knowledgeable of what is in the womb, grant me martyrdom for Your sake and make Jihad easy for me only in Your path…In the name of Allah The Beneficient, The Merciful. Nitro Yoria [Urea] explosive is more powerful than T.N.T….And now, after mastering the English language, learning how to build explosives, and continuous planning to target the infidel Americans, it is time for Jihad. I put my trust in God, for he is the best Master and Authority.

Haynes claims that “the vast majority of American Muslims” are as concerned about Islamic jihad terrorism as non-Muslims are, and adds: “That’s why so many imams in the United States preach and work against extremism and why many American Muslims actively help law enforcement foil terrorist plots.” He doesn’t mention the efforts by the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) to stop Muslims from cooperating with law enforcement. Nor does he note the fact that not a single mosque in the entire United States has any kind of program to teach young Muslims and converts to Islam the errors of the al-Qaeda view of Islam, which they supposedly abhor and reject.

There are many, many other examples of this. All of them demonstrate that concern about Islam and Muslims in the U.S. is anything but "bigotry" and "racism." The mainstream media’s avidity to advance the “Islamophobia” myth makes us all more vulnerable to the ongoing jihad. Instead of demonizing those who are trying to raise awareness of and resistance to that jihad, Charles Haynes and the Washington Post should be joining us to defend the West’s hard-won freedoms. Instead, if free people survive into future generations, they will remember them, if at all, as among the many whose calls to complacency made the struggle to defend freedom exponentially more difficult than it could and should have been. A sorry legacy indeed.